We set fire to our Compost Theory of Culture for our Autumn BRAND BRIEFING on Tuesday — exploring why some brands are thriving on disorder while others are doubling down on discipline and what that tension means for the future.

This BRAND BRIEFING goes deep into the brands, behaviours and cultural signals shaping these two powerful modes with case studies on Skylrk, KFC, Erewhon + Nothing. For decision-makers, it’s not just about spotting trends – it’s about understanding the cultural tensions your brand will need to navigate next.

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SEEDS

If love is a verb, brands need to act. Cynicism around love today often comes from the way we’ve been trained to measure it: by whether it ends in marriage, whether it produces kin. Historically, locking love into the institution of marriage was essential for centralising kinship and inheritance. But in contemporary life, intimacy, care and belonging are increasingly being decoupled from marriage. 

Convenience, it turns out, comes at a cost. The easier something is to capture on a device, the easier it becomes to forget. For brands, this offers a lesson: maybe step back from the growth-hacking mindset that uses cookies and retargeting to cling to attention. If you make yourself too easy to remember, you also make yourself easy to forget. Is losing things online the only way to make them matter?

Our latest FORUM with Tyler Bainbridge (Perfectly Imperfect), Günseli Yalcinkaya (Dazed) and Rachel Lee (ex-DigiFairy) tackled some of the most pressing questions about the intersection of human aesthetics and artificial intelligence. As anticipated, the lively discussion — and equally active chatroom — covered a lot of ground.

Vogue just hired Chloe Malle as its new “head of editorial content”, and the title says it all. She’s not editing a magazine – Anna Wintour still presides over that empire – but managing a stream of “content”. For brands, the lesson couldn’t be clearer. Treat content as information and it evaporates. Treat it as world-building and it becomes sticky, valuable, trusted.

For years, brands have chased polish and precision. Instagram feeds were grids of perfection; campaigns were rehearsed spectacles. Now, some are testing a different approach. Substack, the newsletter platform best known for independent writers, is becoming a space for brands to experiment with voice, immediacy – and, increasingly, a bit of mess.

SEED Club is our global decentralised research community where 350+ brand strategists, insight journalists and cultural curators sow and grow all the SEEDS you see on Protein. We know who they are, but you don't, so we thought we'd ask them about what they're currently obsessing over.

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